This song began when I worked with the Amazonian NGO Alianza Arkana near Pucallpa in the latter part of 2015. I was told by another one of the volunteers that an indigenous craftsman of musical instruments would be stopping by, and that he would be selling these beautiful handmade flutes. The flutes were handpainted with exquisite visionary images by a friend of his, work perhaps inspired by the ayahuasca visions of Shipibo painter and curando Pablo Amaringo. I took the flute with me when I had my second dieta in October outside the city near the tiny Shipibo hamlet of San Salvador. Libélula means dragonfly. There used to be this little grotto near the river where many dragonflies would hang out. While playing to them this melody came to mind and eventually I began singing it in ceremony. In this song I express gratitude for the dragonfly and the ability of Madre Ayahuasca to open our eyes to the transcendent beauty of the natural world. The song is deceptively simple. One of the things that I like about it is this simplicity. It is practically a chant, and there is no verse-chorus-verse structure to it. It has three sections, and all are in different tempos. Because of this I performed the piece more or less “live” on the guitar and then added the singing and other instruments to it. This made it very difficult to mesh the tracks I added later with the original bed track that had been laid down. Also, because the tempo ebbs and flows I could not easily use MIDI (electronically programmed) instrumentation. Every track, though performed separately, had to be performed live. As the song’s tracks ballooned to twenty distinct recordings, my trusty old macbook started to fail on me. Eventually I managed to squeak out this mix. This song had a difficult birth and has been a very humbling learning experience for me. During my first trip to Peru in September of 2014 I spent time in the jungle near Iquitos. There I made several field recordings from my little tambo out in the jungle. My tambo was the furthest away from the others in our little “camp”, and I had some enjoyable afternoons observing monkeys and listening to the wildlife. At night it was a veritable symphony of sounds, insects, owls, frogs and other amphibians all combining to make an immersive jungle soundscape. The recording at the beginning of La Libélula is a day recording that was made in my tambo with a ZOOM recorder I had packed along for my trip. Once written, the vocal was something I sang in ceremony acapella. I decided to flesh it out with other instrumentation for this recording. As I duplicated the opening melody on the guitar and dropped a simple pulsing bass note at the bottom, I started harmonizing it in fifths. This gave the song a decidedly Zen feel to it, which coincides with the naturalistic themes of dragonflies, water, trees and so forth. As I worked on the song here in Argentina, more and more large dragonflies started appearing in our back yard. Seriously, like everyday they would hang out near our grape vines, buzzing about and sometimes flitting by the window where I was working. The night I finished my final mix one flew in and sat by the large glass door to our patio. I gently picked it up and released it outside. It did a large circle around our garden, and buzzed straight back inside and perched above me on the ceiling. An interested party, she wanted to hear the final mix. Since finishing the song, the dragonflies have pretty much left. I see one once in a while, but no where near like it was during the recording of this song. Perhaps its the change in the weather. Perhaps not. Hmmmm…??? La Libélula (Gracias Ayahuasca) The Dragonfly (Thank you Ayahuasca) La Libélula, Libélu lo La Libélula, Libélu la lo Li-di-li-di Li-di-li-di Li-di-li-di la lo Li-di-li-di Li-di-li-di Li-di-li-di lo la lo la lo Gracias, gracias Ayahuasca Thank you, thank you Ayahuasca Gracias, gracias otra vez Thank you, thank you once again Gracias, gracias Medicina Thank you, thank you Medicine Gracias, gracias otra vez Thank you, thank you once again Gracias, gracias Papa Cielo Thank you, thank you Father Sky Gracias, gracias Pacha Mama Thank you, thank you Mother Earth Gracias, gracias Ayahuasca Thank you, thank you Ayahuasca Gracias, gracias otra vez Thank you, thank you once again Gracias, gracias por la lluvia Thank you, thank you for the Rain Gracias, gracias por los Rios Thank you, thank you for the Rivers Gracias, gracias Medicina Thank you, thank you Medicine Gracias, gracias otra vez Thank you, thank you once again Gracias, gracias por la Selva Thank you, thank you for the Forest Gracias, gracias por los arboles Thank you, thank you for the Trees Gracias, gracias Ayahuasca Thank you, thank you Ayahuasca Gracias, gracias otra vez Thank you, thank you once again Gracias, gracias por los Pesces Thank you, thank you for the Fishes Colibris y Libélulas Hummingbirds and Dragonflies Gracias, gracias Medicina Thank you, thank you Medicine Gracias, gracias otra vez Thank you, thank you once again Gracias por el Otorongo Thank you for the Jaguar Gracias, gracias por el Condor Thank you, thank you for the Condor Gracias, gracias Ayahuasca Thank you, thank you Ayahuasca Gracias, gracias otra vez Thank you, thank you once again Gracias, gracias Curandero Thank you, thank you Healer Gracias, gracias Maestro Thank you, thank you Teacher Gracias, gracias Medicina Thank you, thank you Medicine Gracias, gracias otra vez Thank you, thank you once again Gracias, gracias Ayahuasca Thank you, thank you Ayahuasca Gracias, gracias otra vez Thank you, thank you once again
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Last year my then girlfriend Ivana gifted me a crystal of Rhodochrosite. This crystal has a long history in Argentina, and is a symbol of love and devotion. During my most recent dieta in Peru I was fingerpicking some chords and began singing with them and wound up connecting very strongly with this crystal. It became a kind of touchstone for my relationship with my wife, and the song came together very quickly. Eventually I recorded a version of it for our wedding. The following is a little description of the stone that we had read during the ceremony: Rhodochrosite, or Rodocrosita, is the national stone of Argentina. It is a symbol of unconditional love and compassion. The crystal is said to encourage emotional healing, love, creativity and intuition. This stone is commonly found in the form of stalactites and stalagmites in the caves of Argentina, and is also found in the United States. Ivana presented Dirk with a piece of Rhodochrosite last year. Later he realized it was a good symbol for their union, and wrote a song about it during his most recent trip to Peru. Rhodochrosite, known as “Rosa del Inca” or “Inca Rose,” was believed to have been discovered in the pre-Colombian 13th century silver mines in what is now the Northern part of Argentina when it was part of the Inca Empire. An Incan ruler named Viracocha was credited with the discovery of the beautiful red stone, and it became sacred to his people who revered it as the solidified blood of their ancestral kings and queens. Thus, Rodocrosita is also a symbol of ancestry and lineage. And so this ceremony reflects the pink and white colors of this sacred stone, and represents the union of Ivana and Dirk’s national identities as well as being a symbol of familial love and eternal devotion. Recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by my friend Alex for his Natural Born Alchemist podcast. In this interview we discuss some of my travels in Peru, how I met my wife, my work with the medicines of the jungle, and the nature of unconditional love. Dijo “Soy Hierba Luisa
She said I am Hierba Luisa Planta de la Selva Plant of the jungle Tengo regalos para ti I have gifts for you El primero es esta cancion” The first is this song This song was originally written during a plant dieta in the Amazon rainforest, just outside of Pucallpa, Peru. A plant diet, or “dieta”, is the manner by which the local Shipibo shaman learn about the plants that they use in their curative work. This dieta was a combination of plants, the primary plant being Chiric Sanango, a very powerful cleanser of the neurological system. But we also dieted a smaller plant, Yerba Luisa Aquatica. This plant, similar to its cousin that many enjoy in a tea, is in a class of plants the Shipibo call Warmi. Warmi plants are used to attract energy - love, abundance, creativity. And this one is also used as a kind of telepathic link, permitting the curandero added benefits in ceremony. For example, if someone is sad during ceremony, the Yerba Luisa plant will let the curandero know. My girlfriend and I both dieted this plant, and I have to say the instances of our both thinking and even saying the exact same thing greatly increased. While our relationship was relatively new at the time, and many couples do experience these kinds of parallel intuitions/conclusions as the relationship grows, I like to think its the Hierba plant doing its thing. I had a particularly memorable experience with Chiric Sanango during a very intense ayahuasca ceremony. It seemed to be a very powerful night for everyone involved. At one point my friend Gregory came over and started playing a beautiful song on his guitar. He was not playing it to me, but he was very close by. The emotional resonance with the song became stronger and stronger. He was singing a love song about waiting for someone and yearning to change. A song about love, redemption and personal transformation. My girlfriend Ivana was sitting right next to me. Something inside my chest broke lose, and an uncontrolled avalanche of emotion took over. As I regained composure the overwhelming emotional response was replaced with a kind of super-intense electromagnetic sensation in my chest, shooting down my arms and out my hands. My hands felt like two big spinning gyroscopes, producing this incredible energy field. I looked at my arms and could see patterns of blue electricity shooting through them, similar to the textile designs that the local Shipibos call K’na patterns. This astonishing and extremely pleasurable experience continued for quite some time, then our shaman Don Gaspar launched into a very long and intense icaro. In my vision, I saw him astrally as a great king, a kind of Amazonian healer-king complete with headress and bio-luminescent tunic. I sang with him, clapping my big electric hands and laughing the whole time at how ridiculously powerful he was. Later he explained that this was the Chiric Sanango cleaning me out. Our days were filled with free time for yoga, mapatcho (a kind of jungle tobacco), art and music. One day I tuned the E string on my guitar down to D (the infamous drop D tuning saturated by bands during the Great Grunge Wars). Immediately the simple I-V bass figure started happening. As I added chords something took over and soon I knew here was...something. The D became a drone through the whole song, and I plucked chords on top of it, shifting the notes here and there to produce tension and release. The bass figure had a sweet, gentle quality to it, and I started singing over it in a very subdued, almost bossanova like style. For some reason, Spanish seemed appropriate, in spite of my limited vocabulary. I could not quite execute all this while singing...the gentle groove being difficult to maintain. Because of its harmonic simplicity, I immediately felt that layered guitar feedback would lend the song a distinctive atmosphere, and I could work with dissonance around the very simple architecture of the song, creating spacey, ambient effects. The tune sat around for about a year without me really doing much with it. I filled out the lyrics (with a little help from Ivana…the line about the plant whispering in my ear is hers) and shelved it. But then we found a new place to live and I started recording again. After recording an instrumental (Guitano), I felt strongly that the time was right to record something with singing. I had lived in apartments for years, and realized it had seriously inhibited my productivity. The last thing you want is to feel self-conscious at the moment of spontaneous creativity. To compose anything, I need to be in a comfortable place...so comfortable that my own critical faculties can turn off and disassociate from the project I’m working on. I remembered the original vision I had, with the guitar feedback in the background. But I did not have an amplifier to work with, just a tiny practice amp which did not sound good at all. The electric guitars would have to be recorded direct. Then I remembered my eBow. An ebow is a very simple magnetic device that vibrates the steel strings of an electrical guitar to produce infinite sustain. One caveat is that it can only produce linear music on a single string. No chords! The solution to this was to play leads with the ebow through the entire piece improvisationally. Then dub over it without listening to the original take. Then again and again. Eventually my little improvs became more cogent ideas. The end result is a mix between the earlier, more abstract explorations, and the more composed lines that came later on. It is a very use-the-accident, Brian Eno sort of a approach. I also added the little plucked artificial harmonic lines, in order to provide a bit more sonic interest in this very simplistic piece of music. My favorite part of this song occurs at the 2:20 mark. The chords here change, from a simple D major triad, down to a D9b5, down again to Db9sus+ and down to a D triad again. It is a passage with a great deal of unexpected tension, which was then decorated with a big helping of the aforementioned e-bow lines. Hierba Luisa Acuática Nadando en el rio Swimming in the river Bajo de las estrellas Under the stars El rio fluye lentimente The river flowed slowly La Luna bailar en sus aguas The moon danced on its waters Vi una planta pequeña I saw a little plant Creciendo cerca la orcilla Growing by the riverside La planta ere muy bonita The plant was very pretty En mi oido susurro She whispered in my ear Dijo “Soy Hierba Luisa She said I am Hierba Luisa Planta de la Selva Plant of the jungle Tengo regalos para ti I have gifts for you El primero es esta cancion” The first is this song “El segundo regalo para ti The second gift for you Es un imane por energia Is a magnet for energy Energia positiva Positive energy Bueno suerte, y amor” Good luck, and love Cuando nando en el rio When I swim in the river Su presencia me acompania Her presence accompanies me La presencia de Hierba Luisa The presence of Hierba Luisa Hierba Luisa Acuática Hierba Luisa Aquatica Bailarina de las aguas Dancer of the waters Hierba Luisa Acuática Hierba Luisa Aquatica |
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